Big Daddy – what an appropriate name. Matt Cutts, when foretelling the Bid Daddy update, said
“But this is neither an update nor a data refresh; this is new infrastructure. It should be much more subtle/gentle than an update.”
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/
Yeah, right.
Big Daddy will probably be recorded by many webmasters as disruptive as the worst of the past updates – right in line with the magnitude of the Florida or Austin updates. Of course, an update is considered bad only in a relative sense. Those who see a drop in rankings or a drop in indexed pages typically are not fans of the update while those who fare well come to the defense of Google.
If you look on any webmaster forum, you will certainly be able to find a Big Daddy related post. Big Daddy has been associated with several major problems: webmasters with large websites have seen thousands of pages dropping from the index or relegated to a supplemental status, hyphenated domains for a while were not being counted at all, and 301 redirects seem to still have problems.
Unlike past updates, Google has tried to keep webmasters informed as to what we ought to do in order to preserve/increase our rankings. In this regard, Matt Cutts has been a chosen messenger. Before Big Daddy went live, Matt informed the webmaster
community that it was coming. Now that it is fully deployed, Matt has spent time trying to give the webmaster community a set of rules to follow to increase the chance of being looked upon favorably by the Google 'gods'.
Much of what has been said can now be reduced to 5 commandments:
Thou Shalt Know Thy Redirects
Redirects are a tricky beast. Google has had their fair share of problems with redirects, and Big Daddy was partly rolled out to combat these problems. The result? Well, redirects appear to still be a problem – at least for now.
There are two main types of redirects available to webmasters: the 301 redirect and the 302 redirect. A 301 redirect is the most common type of redirect. It is used to tell Google that a page or a site has been permanently moved. A 302 also tells Google that a page has been moved, but only temporarily.
The rule that webmasters should follow is simple:
anytime you change a page's location on your site, you must put in place a 301 redirect to tell Google where the page went. You should never make the same content available in two separate locations, and it is preferable to not simply drop one page while adding another page. Google trusts sites that show consistency in their index, and by using a 301 redirect, you show Google a level of consistency that they can trust.
You can read more on redirects at the following URLs:
The Little 301 That Could
SEO Advice: Discussing 302 Redirects
Redirecting Your Way Out of Google
A Link for a Link Will Lead to SERP Blindness
You have heard 'an eye for an eye' and 'a tooth for a tooth', but a link for a link could lead you into disappearing from the results of Google. The topic of link exchanges is one that is debated at some length by webmasters – many believe they are a penalty waiting to happen while others see plenty of examples of successful link exchanges.
There is more reason now to believe that link exchanges not only offer a marginal benefit, but possibly could even hurt your website's rankings. In the past, the argument for link exchanging was that there are plenty of successful examples of websites that are using link exchanges with very good success. Big Daddy is changing this.
“As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling. ”
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/
Anyone who follows Google knows that they have, time and time again, stated that they do not like link exchanges or purchased links. To them, this represents a way of falsely increasing your search engine rankings by manipulating your inbound link count. They have been combating link exchanges for some time, and slowly they seem to be making progress in weeding out link exchanges.
“The best links are those which are editorially chosen. Linked because of the site's merit. Some of the best SEOs these days are those who are really good at buzz marketing, viral marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing.
Tactics like lavishing on reciprocal links; or reciprocal links don't work as well -- let's try this fad called triangular linking; or let's try buying links; all these sorts of things. These are not the sort of links that are best for your site.
They're certainly more high risk. Buying links is extremely risky. It falls outside of our guidelines, unless you add a no-follow tag. And that's a very simple way to say, "You know what? I only wanted the traffic. I'm not concerned with search engines." ”
http://www.clickz.com/experts/search...le.php/3605961
There certainly will still be examples of sites that use link exchanges successfully – Google is not perfect. But one thing is certain: they are actively working on ways to reduce the benefit of link exchanges and purchased links. In fact, those who abuse link exchanges could actually be hurting their rankings.
“The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking
to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling. The Bigdaddy update is independent of our supplemental results, so when Bigdaddy didn’t select pages from a site, that would expose more supplemental results for a site.”
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/
If you are a webmaster who engages in heavy link exchanging, you may want to consider abandoning your link exchange, requesting your links be removed, and start to build links to your site through traditional marketing methods (you know them – public relations, active advertising, and buzz marketing).
The age of reciprocal links is dying, and dying quickly.
Thou Shalt Not Call Thyself By Any Other Name
Canonicalization is a term that is thrown around quite a bit in SEO circles. As a general rule, any word longer than 8 letters needs a little explanation.
When Google visits your website, they try to find your home page. However, there are many different ways you can access most homepages. Below are a few examples:
http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
https://www.yourdomain.com (a secure URL)
https://yourdomain.com
etc